Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
you_were_the_chosen_one.gif
I jumped ship to Librewolf a year and a half ago (after seeing Mozilla steal people's data and sell it to advertisers), and I'm pretty fucking thankful for that. For anyone looking to leave Mozilla to rot, I highly recommend it.
how are the defaults for librewolf? I’m considering switching but I’m hearing mixed things about the defaults occasionally breaking sites. waterfox seems pretty good too, but I don’t see it packaged as frequently as librewolf.
My only difficulty with LibreWolf on Ubuntu was getting it to be the default browser (it didn't show up in the list of options). Turns out xdg-settings set default-web-browser librewolf.desktop on the command line did the trick.
i'll go against the grain here: Librewolfs's defaults are firmly "meh" for me. still an improvement over the "what the fuck" that's happening in Firefox.
pros: nixs the annoying Pocket / AI / "suggested" nonsense by default. no annoying extras.
neutrals: Firefox Sync is off, but one click and a restart to turn back on. reasonable for a non-Mozilla project. no cookies saved by default might be annoying for some, but you can add exceptions right from the URL bar and i only have a dozen or so of those set for various sites. gods, cohost is still in that list...
cons: ResistFingerprinting is IMHO way overkill and breaks nice things like automatic dark modes just for preserving privacy in the 0.001% of cases where browser fingerprinting matters. same as WebGL being off by default -- i just don't need that kind of protection
i still recommend it. Disable ResistFingerprinting, enable WebGL, enable Firefox Sync, and decide for yourself if you want auto-clearing cookies or not. i also always enable vertical tabs because my horizontal space is a lot less constricted than my vertical. (it's a FF feature!)
Not the person you replied to, but I also switched to Librewolf a couple of months ago, also greatly enjoy it. Here's a link to my nix config where Librewolf gets made to behave a little closer to default Firefox in terms of usability. Honestly not too bad!
The defaults are pretty strict, but most of the page-breaking stuff can be changed in the LibreWolf settings and each one has a description which usually contains a link to a wiki article detailing why you'd want to change it or think twice before changing it.
if you’re here to recommend ladybird, tell us why you’re doing advocacy for that trash fire in spite of the well-sourced, ah, downsides pointed out in article and video linked from the OP.
same for brave. I don’t give a fuck if privacyguides told you it was the goodest browser.
if you’re here to advocate for ladybird or brave and haven’t read the article in the OP, fuck off. don’t come here pretending to discuss something you haven’t read.
On the subject of Brave:
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_brave_browser_controversies/ it really has a little bit to many controversies. (And the list is downplaying some of it, the wikipedia clone added wasn't just some random one, it is was the one created by the alt right, neo-nazi Vox Day. Addition of which by the CEO should be enough to not want to use the browser at all).
important addendum: your reason for advocating for shit browsers owned by terrible people will be read out loud in the clown voice it deserves
Lemmy needs a feature where we can click a button on a comment and make everyone see that comment in Comic Sans.
And if you're here to report the mods for rudeness, lolz
ahahaha delicious
The era of useful Silicon Valley Non-Profits seems to be fizzling out. I wonder how long Signal is going to hold out...
(Those are my 2 reference points, if I'm ignorant of some cool org let me know.)
Wikipedia is still doing good
Which is why there has been some push to undermine it lately. I have noticed ai bro calling it deprecated by chatgpt, or musk's grokipedia
I think I already said this but you're not making me use something called "Floorp" even if it's the last piece of software in the world. Just come on.
I used Floorp for a while. (The search engine that dominated the industry was named for a child's nonsense-babble word for 10^100; nobody has a leg to stand on here.) It had a rare but persistent (and thus difficult to diagnose) problem of crashing my laptop hard when opening a private-mode window. Also, they're planning to incorporate AI on an "opt-in" basis instead of rejecting it on moral grounds.
The search engine that dominated the industry was named for a child’s nonsense-babble word for 10^100;
And how did that work out in the long term? There were warning signs!
So thats a no on "Floorp" then. Good
sadly, Floorp is going AI browser. I mean, "choice" to pick the bits of rat poop out browser.
from the youtube browser comments, "Ladybird is our last hope" seems to be the new standard promotional cut'n'paste phrase
last hope for what, you might ask? well the true anti-woke browser, which is much more important than actually, say, working.
presumably brave is too SJW for these guys, as well as basically working insofar as it's just a chrome reskin
they want the TRUE GLORIOVS FVTVRE that only a nonexistent thing that doesn't fucking work, and won't cos the lead bozo is vibe coding it, can offer.
in fashtech, promises of future glory always beat present day actually fucking working
Presumably, if Firefox version N breaks ad-blocking, someone can make a hard fork of version N-1. Security patches, upgrades to OS support and things like new CSS/HTML features can be cherry-picked or reimplemented to it, though Firefox updates in general will not be admitted, as it’s a hard fork (in the way that LibreOffice or MariaDB is). At worst, Firefox will actively make it hard to do this, closing their source or changing their licence to one which prohibits it, requiring any updates to be reimplemented clean-room style, which will slow things down, though if the alternative is actively enshittified, it’s the least-bad option.
The good news is it generally isn't necessary to reverse engineer browser behavior when writing a browser. Since it's mostly fairly standardized, there's a decent test suite, and the major browsers are all open source.
Though this comes with some caveats:
I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as "Google needs a competitor"), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad's DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to "complete") has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.
Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren't on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.
this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine
maybe my favorite pivot to ai article yet, definitely top three at least. wonderful work
small typo.
So guess what Mozilla did? When you update Firefox, tt re-enables the AI! And if you disable the AI again, it re-enables it again next update! Choose correctly, user!
"tt" should be "it"
